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Timequake
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Read Timequake

Timequake (1997) (edit title/settings)

by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

According to science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur in New York City on February 13th, 2001, where the Earth decides to back up a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja-vu and a total loss of free will.

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(from book jacket)
On February 13th, 2001, according to Vonnegut, the universe will tire momentarily of expanding forever. What's the point? Maybe it would be more fun to shrink for a change, and have a reunion of all the stuff back where it began. Then it could make a great big BANG... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

(from book jacket)
On February 13th, 2001, according to Vonnegut, the universe will tire momentarily of expanding forever. What's the point? Maybe it would be more fun to shrink for a change, and have a reunion of all the stuff back where it began. Then it could make a great big BANG again.
It will shrink back to February 17th, 1991, but will then decide that expansion is the way to go after all. As time marches on once more to 2001, though, Vonnegut and Trout and everybody else and everything else will have to do exactly what they did the first time through the decade, for good or ill: marry the wrong person, bet on the wrong horse. Whatever! Ten years of deja vu all over again! But all hell cuts loose when the rerun is over and free will kicks in again. Everybody is so used to being a robot of the past that almost nobody is prepared to think of new things to do and then do them, in order to avoid accidents or whatever. Off-balance pedestrians will fall down and not get back up. Unsteered motor vehicles will slay them by the millions. Factory workers will allow themselves to be gobbled up by their own machinery!
Hero of the moment? Kilgore Trout!

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “…The Universe suffered a crisis in self-confidence. Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?”
  • “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
    Quote from son Mark Vonnegut, pediatrician and watercolorist and sax player…
  • “I would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody else feel like something the cat drug in.”
  • “I’m wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.”
  • “Physicists must, from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • “Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.”
    Highlighted by 22 Kindle customers
  • Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!
    Highlighted by 20 Kindle customers
  • The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can’t.
    Highlighted by 20 Kindle customers
  • They say the first thing to go when you’re old is your legs or your eyesight. It isn’t true. The first thing to go is parallel parking.
    Highlighted by 20 Kindle customers
  • “Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”
    Highlighted by 19 Kindle customers
  • I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.
    Highlighted by 19 Kindle customers
  • “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can’t get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • “There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.” The moral at the end of that story is this: “Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.”
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
Show all 15 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

Call me Junior.

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

  • Determinism: Vonnegut uses the premise of a timequake (or repetition of actions) in which there is no free will. The idea of determinism is explored -- as it is in many of his previous works -- to assert that people really have no free will. Kilgore Trout serves again as the main character. Vonnegut explains in the beginning of the book that he was not satisfied with the original version of Timequake he wrote (or Timequake One). So, he took parts of Timequake One and combined it with personal thoughts and anecdotes to make the finished product, so-called Timequake Two. Many of the anecdotes deal with Vonnegut's family, the death of loved ones, and people's last words. (From Wikipedia)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Putnam
Country: U.S.A.
Publication Date: 1997
ISBN: 0-399-13737-8
Page Count: 219

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PS3572.O5 T56 1997
  • Dewey: 813/.54 21

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